At #2 on this week’s Billboard Hot 100 is ‘Die with a Smile,’ the collab between Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars.
The song was released in August of 2024 and kicked around the top ten for months until finally reaching #1 in January of this year. It has been kept alive on the charts by the release of multiple alternate versions, a Grammy win, and inclusion on Gaga’s latest album, Mayhem.
I haven’t done an installment of ‘What the Kids are Listening To’ since last August (not counting the year-end roundup) so I figured it was high time. Over the next two weeks, I’ll offer up the songs currently topping Billboard’s Hot 100.
At #1 this week is ‘luther,’ a collaboration between Kendrick Lamar and SZA, the third single from Lamar’s latest studio album, GNX. This song has been atop the Hot 100 for ten straight weeks, making it the longest running chart-topper for both artists.
The #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 the week of May 4, 1965, was a novelty track by Herman’s Hermits titled ‘Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.’
When I first saw this title, I was reminded of daily commenter Dana’s question just last week: If you removed the parenthetical opening phrase of B.J. Thomas’ ‘(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,’ would it still have the longest title of a #1 song?
Well, the answer is no… today’s SOTD has a seven-word title with no parentheses, topping the six non-parenthetical words in Thomas’ track. So that mystery didn’t take long to solve.
Throwing back to the week of May 3, 1955, we find two repeats atop the Billboard singles chart: Perez Prado’s ‘Cherry Pink (and Apple Blossom White)’ at #1 and Bill Hayes’ ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’ at #2.
In the third spot was a song I mentioned a few weeks back in another Throwback Weekend post. The featured song was Georgia Gibbs’ ‘Tweedle Dee,’ and I noted that it was one of two tracks Gibbs had in the top ten at the time. The other was ‘Dance With Me Henry (Wallflower).’
David Lynch’s final feature film was his most confounding.
After winning praise for delivering a conventional story in The Straight Story and earning the best reviews of his career with the sublime Mulholland Drive, he returned in 2006 with Inland Empire, a strange and unsettling experimental film.
This is a three-hour movie with no discernible plot. It was shot on standard definition video using a camera Lynch operated himself. He also handled editing duties and composed most of the music. It fulfilled his desire to strip filmmaking down to the basics and make a film in a way anybody with a camera and some willing actors could.
Meet Me In Montauk 